Page 2045 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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Another is that as a city state with a central courts precinct, bringing all of the necessary services together in one location is easier to achieve. Finally, Canberra is a progressive city with a government that is absolutely committed to restorative outcomes across the justice system.
A working group has been established within the Supreme Court already to look at how a drug and alcohol court can succeed in Canberra. That working group includes judges, legal professionals, corrections experts and health experts. It is working through the challenges inherent in creating a new treatment-focused court. The government provided $400,000 in the 2017-18 budget to better support the design and the scoping work that is already underway.
The drug and alcohol court is a key part of this government’s efforts to make Canberra a restorative city with a rehabilitative justice system. As Attorney-General, I have a responsibility to ensure that our courts are working in concert with the rest of the community to rehabilitate offenders and therefore to reduce recidivism.
Minister Rattenbury’s amendments will mean that the motion is more focused on rehabilitation services and through care. In supporting this motion as amended, I would like to emphasise that the government’s work as a whole will be people focused. The statistics that are cited in this motion are indeed useful measures. The most successful programs to address recidivism statistics will come from an even better understanding of people. In creating a drug and alcohol court in the correctional system and across the diverse range of services that we deliver, this government is and will remain people-focused and progressive. I commend the motion as amended.
MRS KIKKERT (Ginninderra) (5.50): I rise today to share a few words in support of Mrs Jones’s motion. The first part of the motion includes some sobering statistics, but I do not wish to talk much about statistics. Numbers are important, of course, because it is the numbers that tell us that something is not right in the territory and therefore needs to be fixed. By one measure, the ACT has the highest rate of recidivism in Australia. The program designed to help lower recidivism rates for Aboriginal inmates appears to be failing to make a difference. At the same time, personal crime rates in parts of the territory are worsening.
But there is a very important reality behind these numbers, one that we must never lose sight of. When we discuss these statistics, what we are really discussing is people. It is one thing to talk about 74 per cent of ACT prisoners having been previously imprisoned; it is a completely different thing to think about the individual men and women behind the statistic. These are not just ACT prisoners. They are someone’s sons and daughters. In most cases, they will have mums and dads who love them, who worry about how they are going, who wish and hope and pray that someone, somewhere, would do something to help their children turn their lives around. In many cases, they will be somebody’s brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties, cousins, mates and friends.
They may also themselves be someone’s mum or dad. Think about that for a moment. Think about the little girls and little boys who desperately hope that dad or mum
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